Robert Hyatt and Dr. Jesse Hurlbut, French Dept

I had the good fortune to be introduced to the Henry de Sainct-Didier manual by a friend named John Clements, and I was able to obtain one of the few surviving copies of this manual from a used bookstore in France. With fellow student Devin Wilson, we had translated most of the manual. For my ORCA project, I refined the translation and with Devin’s long-distance help, translated the rest of the poems. I scanned in entire manual at an extra-high resolution and arranged to have Paladin Press publish the book. Paladin Press now has the final manuscript and is getting it ready to publish later in 2007.

I include here the Introduction and Historical Background that I wrote for the book as part of its preparation for publishing. I will also turn in a copy of the DVD with the final manuscript and scans to the ORCA office.

Introduction

We hope you like swords. Swords have always intrigued us, and we are very happy to let you in on Henry de Sainct Didier’s secrets.

We want you to be able to learn to fight with the kind of sword in this manual, a renaissance cut-and-thrust or ‘single’ sword. We have done most of the hard work for you: we translated what de Sainct Didier said and then tried to explain it in modern English so you don’t have to wade through tedious technical writing to figure out what is going on in the pictures. To become a decent fighter with this weapon, all you need to do is pick up a sword, study this manual, and practice long and hard with someone else. We are sure that de Sainct Didier wouldn’t have had it any other way.

From our experience with this and other manuals from this time period, we think that the techniques in the manual are not intended to be an exhaustive list of what can be done with this weapon. Instead, all techniques are there to demonstrate general principles you can extract and elaborate into a full fighting system. Unfortunately, we do not have the other books that either were going to be or were written by Henry de Sainct Didier on other weapon combinations (see the “Privilege du Roy,” in the appendix), leaving this manual focusing only on single sword vs. single sword. Though useful, not all techniques will work against certain weapons combinations.

To help you, we are providing an opening chapter explaining the general principles that we were able to discover and apply from our experience with the manual. We hope you will learn as much as we have discovering this manual for yourself. Since we will not try and claim absolute mastery of the material, we hope that you might be able to take your knowledge further than ours was at this book’s publishing.

If you aren’t looking to learn how to fight, but are rather a curious scholar, we hope that you will enjoy our work too. We have done our best to cross all our t’s and dot all our i’s, but it is possible that we missed something. If we did, please forgive us and send us your feedback, so that we can improve this book in possible future editions.

Historical Background

In this manual, Henry de Sainct Didier lets us know who he is, how he learned how to fight, and shows us the different ways the single sword was used. De Sainct Didier calls himself a “gentleman of Provence,” which most likely means he was a lesser noble from that region. He served in the French army for 25 years in “Piedmont and elsewhere,” probably referring to the 16th century French occupation of Savoy and Piedmont following the “Italian Wars.” De Sainct Didier also says that he has “lived his whole life learning to fight with the single sword,” and that he has “reached a point of perfection” and wanted to further serve the king by putting his knowledge into a book.

De Sainct Didier was influenced by the Italians; he probably sought out exposure to Italian swordplay during his military service in northwestern Italy/eastern France. It is possible that a Lieutenant Henry de Sainct Didier faced off against an advanced Italian student, or a Provost, from one of the Italian fencing schools of the day, and helped inspire the format for the manual. De Sainct Didier borrowed Italian fencing words by using French translations of them to name the three blows of the single sword—Maindroit, Renvers and Estoc.

De Sainct Didier believes that the single sword is the “mother of all arms.” It was used by military and professional swordsmen alike in the late 16th century. Its slender profile and sharp point demonstrate the period’s start on a trend to rely on the thrust and avoid the cut. Throughout the manual, the Lieutenant prefers to cut at the Provost, while the Provost loves to thrust at the Lieutenant’s face. Though primarily a writing convention, it shows how a skilled swordsman would incorporate both cut and thrust in a fight.

This manual is unique in several ways. It is the earliest surviving French sword fighting manual known to exist. As noted by Sydney Anglo in his book, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe, de Sainct Didier was also the first to institute “geometrical ground plans and numbered footprints to indicate the correct sequence of movements.” Also unique to this manual is the way de Sainct Didier used his woodcuts in a “coherent plan designed to elucidate, and not merely to illustrate, the text.” To do this, de Sainct Didier “literally spells out the relationship between his words and pictures,” illustrating “every guard and movement discussed in the text in terms of the same two adversaries” which are carefully numbered and referred to.

Another interesting part of de Sainct Didier’s manual is that he must have had the images before he wrote the final text for it, as he corrects a few of the pictures with the text, telling us that the print-maker made an error. This allows us to have some extra confidence that everywhere else is correct.